To inform how we think about EU media law in the future, this chapter traces the understandings of harm evident in EU media laws, their proposal documents, and explanatory notes since the 1989 Television Without Frontiers Directive. It identifies a shift from concern with individual harm from exposure to content, to addressing a variety of sources of harm to individual consumers, collectives, and societal systems. It demonstrates that a link between assumptions about control over risk and responsibility remains persistent and shows how responsibility for preventing harm has been increasingly distributed among various actors as changes in the technology and design of services and in the harms being addressed have affected control over the risk. This chapter argues that future thinking in EU media law needs to focus on how the institutional architecture can support effective cooperative responsibility, including addressing imbalances of power and information asymmetries.

By 2022, social media platforms had become more prominent access points to news than traditional news media platforms. Although news media also draw benefits from online platforms, they find themselves in an increasingly asymmetric relationship that appears to harm journalists and new media’s ability to generate revenues online. Remedying the uneven playing field between big tech and news media has been a recurring ambition of European media policy. In the context of literature on corporate political activity, this chapter investigates how three big tech companies, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, have positioned themselves in relation to EU policymaking that aims to strengthen the rights of journalists, news media and press publishers online. The chapter argues that while these big tech companies primarily seek to preserve their own business models and reputations, the media policy domain also reveals a split in their lobby narratives. Due to lower exposure to reforms in digital media policy, Microsoft has been less opposed to, and in fact has campaigned for, stronger protection for news media against digital platforms.

This chapter examines the dynamics of European Union (EU) media regulation created in response to digital communication challenges that affect media freedom and pluralism. In the context of the trend of outsourcing digital regulation to global private actors, the chapter focuses on the redistribution of media regulation competencies between Member States and the EU as an implication of the European Media Freedom Act. Particular attention is placed on the problems of enforcement and compliance; discrepancies in how supranational regulations are interpreted, together with differences in resources available to national regulators, could prevent the intended outcomes. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the democratic legitimacy of EU media regulation, pointing to the widening gap between public deliberations and regulatory decisions in the transnational sphere.